Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard, also referred to as 4G LTE, provides regulations for wireless communication of high-speed data for mobile phones and data terminals. The network technologies providing the wireless communication can increase the capacity and speed using a different radio interface together with core network improvements. A wireless network provider typically registers a customer with a specific data plan determining the data usage limit for the customer and customers can sign up for data plans based on their need for data and for the access speed. For example, a customer with extreme data needs may sign up for an unlimited data plan, which allows the customer to use as much data as desired during a billing cycle. However, such customers with unlimited data access behavior may impact the user experience of other customers within the same Radio Access Network (RAN) section. Wireless network providers can use mechanisms such as, for example, bandwidth throttling to effectively manage the network resources and ensure network reliability by preventing the heaviest usage customers from causing congestion to other customers. For example, for customers with unlimited data plan, when data usage within a billing cycle exceeds a certain threshold, (e.g. 5 Gigabytes), the network can put the customers on a lower speed for the rest of the billing cycle. In this case, at the start of a new billing cycle, the restriction can be removed and the customers can resume high data speed.
However, at the billing cycle reset time, potentially high volume of messages need to be exchanged within the network for removing the speed restriction on the customers with applied restriction. This is because the current network standards do not provide a mechanism to set command level parameters to take effect in a future time.
Therefore, a need exists for a mechanism to throttle customer bandwidth once data usage threshold by that customer is reached, and enforce resumption of high speed data access at a future time such as the start time of a new billing cycle.